[Eug Wanker]

THE LORD OF THE RINGS THEY LIKE IT, THEY REALLY LIKE IT

(If the link doesn't work, just use this Google link to read it.)

he critics' reviews are still several weeks away, but for the 2,000 people who constituted the first public audience of the most ambitious theatrical project in history, the verdict Saturday night was a decisive thumbs up.

"It's a thing of great beauty," said entertainment lawyer Brian Wynn, after the show ended with a standing ovation. "But the world needs to know what the concept is. It's not a musical. It's not a Stratford production. It's somewhere in between. If you come expecting a new Les Miz or Oklahoma -- it's not. But I think they've pulled out the poetry and the themes better than the movies."

The gnarled forests of Middle Earth thrust out to embrace the audience. The automated, cantilevered stage turns, twists, rises, falls and tilts in myriad and extraordinary ways -- at one moment, a winding forest path, the next, a soaring battlefield promontory, while wind and smoke swirl through the auditorium. Menacing orcs leap and tumble like pre-historic Raptors.

A dozen Ents --14-feet-high humanoid trees (actors on stilts) -- conduct a council of the forest.



It looks like they may need better costumes though:

[hickey]

whoever gets to play gollum is lucky as hell

[ghporter]

I'd like to know who got chosen for that test audience... Are they LotR geeks, theater geeks, or what?

I think that after the books and the movies, it would take some pretty seriously kick-ass writing combined with both hella-great acting and fabuloso direction (did I miss any weird modifiers here?) to generate a stage play that had a chance of entertaining an audience that had more than a few Tolkien fans in it.

Oh, and who's producing the thing? Is Peter Jackson involved, or did his rights extend only to film?

[wdlove]

Very nice